A Rebuttal to Sarah–and others

I’ve received a smattering of calls and emails in the vein of commenter Sarah, who said this in response to the original license plate post:

Can you concider (sic) talking about something news worthy? I am so sick of this license plate issue. really who cares what it looks like? thank you gov. for keeping this process cost effective and not extending the pain of Jack and Johns listeners, this is close to the rants and irrelevant raves of the state fair park cry babies…

Just to clarify, we were not the only ones who thought this was a relevant, newsworthy story worth part of the day’s discussion on the air. Joining us in that opinion were the Journal Star (twice), their editorial board, the Omaha World-Herald, 10/11 TV, WOWT, and many other outlets who featured the story prominently today or yesterday. In addition, this was far and away the most commented story on the LJS’s website for the entire week (and started a brushfire discussion almost all of the links above), almost quadruple anything close.

When I plan topics for a show, my aim is to talk about the things Lincoln is talking about, and this clearly fits that bill. I’m the first to admit that may not always be the hard news story. We’re of the belief that morning radio listeners like a little levity mixed in with the news occasionally. You can get pure hard news from scads of media sources, but we try to provide a little something extra–commentary, laughs, community discussions, lifestyle topics, entertainment, etc.

Plus, given that we spent a good portion of the last week talking about grave subjects like abortion ultrasounds and lethal injections and will discuss our state’s most vulnerable citizens, the developmentally disabled, with the Governor tomorrow, I think there’s some room to spend time on a lighter topic, which happens to interest a huge number of our listeners (we had singificantly more calls than we could get to). That’s not even mentioning that some people are claiming this incident is exposing dishonesty from our government officials. From what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t personally go that far, but the theory is certainly out there.

Based on the above, I certainly think that merited interviews with the principals, discussion and maybe a little light-hearted fun with the topic for about a third of the show today. That said, I can always use more topic suggestions for my aresenal of show fodder, so I always welcome you all to email them to us at our new email address, JackandJohn@klin.com.